Customer Reviews

Gantz Volume 1 (v. 1)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The individual ingredients--teen angst, existential dilemma, sexual anxiety, purgatory, alien hunting, graphic violence, and computerized spheres that house omnipotent but catatonic men--could have calamitously collided. In fact, they could have made a grim, clumsy train wreck, like the one that launches the mind-bending, viscerally charged narrative of this fabled manga. But in the hands of Hiroya Oku, writer and digital artist, Gantz is one of the genre's most thoroughly addictive, eminently readable entries.

The story follows sometimes friends Kei and Masaru on their surrealistic, supernaturally amped adventures through Tokyo, following a train accident that may or may not have killed them. In the realm of the undead, the less-than-dynamic duo--typical teens: angry, disenfranchised, mischievous, and constantly thinking of sex--is drawn into an underbelly of alien-hunting by a mysterious orb named Gantz, who apparently controls their destiny and promises to restore their quote-unquote real lives once they have completed enough missions for him. These missions (think Mission: Impossible meets The Matrix) come replete with high danger, cool gadgets, hyper-gory violence, and Big Bads named Onion Alien, Bird Alien, and Buddhist Temple Alien.

New characters join Kei and Masaru. The female ones frequently shed their clothing. The males are quick to slice, dice, and otherwise draw blood. The series succeeds--over nearly 500 issues--by offering consistently inventive individual missions against the ongoing mystery of who and what is Gantz and what is the purpose of these body-splattering, alien-hunting assignments.

Gantz is front-loaded with metaphysical queries (a la Lost), a hardboiled sensibility (a la Hammet or, say, Haruki Murakami), and graphic ultra-violence (think M-rated first-person shooter games, the ones where decapitations and downpours of blood are the norm), and is, resultantly, an awful lot of fun. Grim fun, but fun.

The utter normalcy of Oku's teen characters makes their upstream paddling against their environment's endlessly enigmatic sci-fi shadings all the more delicious, while the writer's willingness to wrestle with recent historical atrocities adds a deft and deep--if oftentimes delirious--resonance to the storyline. Oku's artwork, digitally rendered, is breathtaking, even though it's often incredibly grisly--one that's decidedly not for the faint of heart.

-- J. Rentilly

I picked this one up on a reccommendation from a magazine for someone who is just looking to get into reading manga. I found the story to be intriguing, a bit of sci-fi and a bit of mystery as the characters struggle to understand where they are and what they are doing there. The artwork was very pretty and I definately look forward to reading Volume 2. I guess the reason I didn't give this 5 stars is because the story line is a bit confusing right now, but that just might be me being new to manga. I'll tell you though, don't flip back and forth from reading manga to american comics because you'll forget which way to read the panels :)
Overall, B+/A-

This series is fantastic but the things which occur in the manga are sure to alienate many would be readers.Not without reason as people are frequently killed. However, the art is good and the story is consistently good ensuring that the average reader won't be able to put the book down.

Okay now let me first start of by saying that Gantz the series is my all time favorite manga! I'm going to do a review on the series. Right now I'm pretty far in (ch 267) and let me say, it keeps getting better and better! Gantz is defiantly unpredictable. So the story starts of with the main character Kei (my fav character) at the subway station ready to go home from a day of school. As Kei is waiting an old child hood friend stands next to him. Kei was thinking about the past with him when a hobo fell on to the train tacks and Kato (the child hood friend) becomes the hero and jumps on to the tracks to help. Kato tries to pick him up but is unable to so he looks to the croud for help. He spots Kei and calls to him. Now Kei is not the person to help but he does. After getting the hobo of the tracks the train comes. Kei and Kato run for their lives but...the train hits them and their heads come clear off. All of a sudden they are transferred to a condo with other people and a big black ball (or Gantz). After a while Gantz starts to sing an old exercise song and words start to appear on Gantz saying "Your lives are now over you bastards and they belong to me, thats how the cookie crumbles." After that gantz opens up reveling 3 types of guns, suits and a organism inside (looks like a person). Gantz then tells you to go out and kill aliens.
Really weird huh? The artwork is amazing, the characters are epic and the story is exciting! What more could you ask for?! Anyway the story starts of slow but picks up fast so just don't give up on this series!

The ordinary life of a high school student Kei Kurono is turned into a bizarre nightmare when he was struck dead by the subway train together with his childhood friend Masaru Kato. When Kei thinks his life is over, the two boys find themselves in a small apartment room in Tokyo, where they meet a handful of people, all strangers to each other, who have just been "dead." Or are they?

The fact is, a mysterious black orb GANTZ has summoned them, saying "ALL OF YOUR OLD LIVES ARE GONE. I WILL DECIDE HOW TO USE YOUR NEW LIVES. Now the "team" is given equipments and sent on a deadly mission to hunt down aliens within the limited time, but it seems there are a set of rules the participants are yet to learn that decide who can survive the battle, and who can't.

As the "Parental Advisory" warning suggests, the manga created by Hiroya Oku, which has been serialized in Shueisha's "Weekly Young Jump" since 2000, is very violent and gory (including nudity, too), but the violence and gores are interspersed with dark humor like in such action-paced films as Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop."

Oku's character designs are beautifully done, with the fine background artwork supported by the 3D rendered storyboard that captures the dark fantasy world of the "game" with a clever use of the buildings and streets of a Japanese city. (See the "Making of" at the end of the book.)

The long on-going series, made into anime series and a two-part live-action film, has been a hit in Japan, but you might (and I do) think the series is a little too long (29 volume at the time of writing). Whatever your reaction is, earlier volumes of GANTZ are addictively fun, with lots of ultra violence and unexpected jokes.

Okay that's a simplification, but if you want the quick gist of what Gantz is about (since the title alone would tell you squat) then the above distills the concept pretty well. A group of random people, all caught in moments where they're about to die, are whisked to a mysterious room with a black orb. They're given high-tech weapons and suits and told to hunt down "aliens" night after night. This volume sets things up and tackles the first assignment, the "Onion Alien." Chaos ensues.

What is Gantz and what's really going on? That's a question that really doesn't get touched on for a long, long time, and even though the Japanese run is 25+ volumes in, much remains a mystery. It doesn't matter though, because Gantz shines with its characters. Hiroya Oku hits a realistic portrayal of main lead Kurono Kei. He's an apathetic, hormonal-driven teenager who could care less about other people. Kei's a real jerk and anti-hero, and a lot of the drama/angst in Gantz revolves around the choices he makes and his treatment of others around him. It's grim, but its refreshingly accurate to life.

Gantz also packs in a ton of sex and violence which should get just about any male reader's attention. The series is 18+, so the title pages are often scantily-clad pin-up girls carrying guns and our female lead makes her entrance in the nude (and is promptly sexually assaulted). Violence is brutal and gory in that torn-apart, guts splattering kinda way. If I have one complaint it's that like most titles in the genre, the action goes on for far too long at times, often extending for volumes before resolution. But what a resolution! Gantz is a completely unpredictable series, and none of the characters are safe. The roster switches up considerably as the series progresses, so there's always a sense of danger.

Kudos to Dark Horse for finally bringing this series over (and putting it on a bi-monthly schedule). It definitely won't appeal to everyone, but if any of the above sounds like it interests you, Gantz is worth the investment.

Brutal, hard-hitting, and gritty. But that doesn't quite describe the experience of Gantz. An enigma wrapped in a mystery, with [...] hanging out. It's not for children, but it is for people that crave sophisticated stories with fantastic artwork that almost makes you forget its artwork. Faithful to the anime so far, hard to improve when you're so close to perfection.

An anime's dedication to its source material is both its curse and its blessing. The first volume of Gantz takes us about midway into the Onion Alien arc, ending while the players are still in combat. Assuming you've seen the anime by now, the manga thus has few of the jarring surprises experienced in the anime. The only "extras" the manga has over the anime are the chapter opening illustrations, with their dose of cheesecake *and* irony, the "making of" pages, and a short bio of the author's previous works. That being said, the anime only covers part of the manga, namely, the Onion Alien, the Bird Alien, and the Buddhist Temple Alien story arcs. The last hunt is not from the manga, something of a relief to many viewers of the anime. It should take us, say, seven volumes before coming to new material not in the anime, but the wait should well be worth it!

EDIT: Unfortunately, I found the second volume to be less interesting than the first. It draws out the encounter (more like running away) between the main character and one of the Very Bad Guys, and just begins the "back home" arc between the Onion Aliens and the next hunt. I think the anime did the second volume of the manga *much* better.

First of all, let me say...HUGE Gantz fan. I loved the anime...I thought it was amazing...and then when I heard from tons of people that the manga was even more amazing I had to check it out. At the time there was no retail copies in the store. So I read through some chapters online. Of course not all of the translators online are going to be professional. But sadly enough...I was completely turned off by this retail copies translations. It seems to be too exact I guess or something...and it kind of seems like they toned it down a bit. I can't say for sure if its more accurate than the translations I enjoy from the anime and online...considering I'm not fluent in Japanese...but I can tell you that you may wan't to be forewarned before you purchase. Although I was not totally turned on by the translations, I will continue to purchase the manga for the fact that the art and story are still intact for the most part. At least they finally put it on the shelves!

This is by far my fav manga. The content is a bit mature but, it's the best sci-fi storyline i've ever read.